These are the diaries of Mitchell Darman.
Twenty six years old. Six hundred and eleven days after the lights went out. A soldier in a war between the Freedom Fighters Army and the Liberty Warriors, both of them claiming to represent freedom, tearing the southeastern United States apart over a word.
He traded a can of peaches for three composition books. He filled them.
What he wrote down: sixty rowboats going upstream through Louisiana alligator country to take an outpost held by 250 men. A captain he could be loyal to. A woman carrying her dead husband's rifle. An old trapper loyal to no army on earth. Fourteen names, then twenty, then more than he could count.
Every entry is his. Nothing is cleaned up, including the parts that damn him.
Somewhere eleven miles out in the Gulf there is a platform with the lights still on, and somebody out there is printing lists of names.
War either makes you a killer or it kills you. There is no third option.